Upgrading Law Enforcement: How Interactive Whiteboards Can Improve Public Safety Training

By Nadav Avni, CMO of Radix Technologies

Law enforcement’s duty to serve justice and maintain public order and safety are critical to your community. For the most part, police methods to protect and serve the public have remained unchanged over the years. But as technologies improve, criminal tactics have also become more sophisticated. To stay ahead, law enforcement units should utilize modern technology as well. This includes upgrading tactics and equipment during both operations and public safety training.

For many rookie law officers, mastering crime prevention and public safety methods can be challenging. It doesn’t help that they still have to contend with antiquated training methods and equipment. If police find their training methods to be behind the times, how can they expect the new generation of officers to stay engaged? 

Why Public Safety Training Programs Need More Interactivity

Public safety training is a basic requirement for people who want a job in law enforcement agencies and emergency response. The program covers diverse subjects that aim to protect the public from further harm. Courses include training in active law enforcement, disaster management, firefighting, emergency medical services, rescue and retrieval services, and personal protection. 

Using basic equipment such as static whiteboards, projectors, and video players when conducting training might not be the best approach. After all, today’s generation of budding law officers have moved from paper and pencil to smart devices. They’re more likely to have learned their ABCs and watched videos on smartphones or tablets. 

Since a young age, they’ve known how to connect to WiFi, launch apps on devices, and drag their fingers across a touchscreen. Subjecting them to training sessions using older, manual equipment will seem both inefficient and ineffective. 

At the same time, trainers can benefit from a less stressful training session. Dragging around different pieces of equipment and booting them up individually can take precious time away from sessions. Manually switching among projectors, whiteboards, and video players can also lead to lots of dead air time. 

What’s more, trainees can get distracted by minor setbacks such as dry whiteboard markers or flickering projector lamps. In this age of smartphones, surely something as important as public safety training deserves better and more modern equipment. 

How Interactive Whiteboards Aid in Public Safety Training

Enter the interactive whiteboard. Forget heavy equipment such as projectors and video players—trainers can simply turn on the hardware and start teaching. Even better, today’s generation of cadets should have no problem recognizing the technology and warming up to it. 

Audience engagement is also a key selling point of interactive whiteboards. Touchscreen technology says goodbye to markers and erasers. Instead, trainers and participants can directly write on the screen and have the application save everything. 

And as a media player, the interactive whiteboard can do it all. Whether it’s presenting a slideshow, playing a video, or holding an interactive quiz with multiple participants, this device is up to the task. This allows public safety training officers to share a wider assortment of training material that students can better appreciate. 

Team Building 

Presentations are just one of the many functions that interactive whiteboards can handle. Multi-touch technology also enables trainers to run interactive activities that require audience participation. 

Team-building activities especially can benefit from this interactivity. For instance, trainers can hold public safety training challenges where teams have to collaborate and work together using the screen. They can also hold competitions that ask trainees to solve puzzles or complete equations on the board. 

Compared to just sitting back and listening to a trainer present, participative learning is far more engaging and interesting to young students who are eager to learn. 

Boosting Trust and Retention Through Interactive Training

The best thing about interactive whiteboards is that trainees learn while having fun. Amid the presentations, the competition, and the collaborative efforts, the students retain the knowledge better. 

Touchscreens respond differently when users input the correct answer versus the wrong one. This system of instant feedback promotes knowledge retention better than classroom lectures or memorization. 

Using interactive whiteboards to simulate real-world scenarios can also help provide a better training experience for students. Instant feedback mechanisms help students quickly recognize the right and wrong approaches to specific events. Trainers can even adjust the simulations to require trainees to respond quickly. Similar to entering an incorrect answer or action, a slow response (or nonresponse) can trigger the program to flash a negative outcome. 

And Remember: How You Manage Your Tech Matters

Management of the interactive touchscreen is integral to its performance. Updating the device to run the latest operating system, firmware, and application versions keeps it working to its fullest potential. 

But getting each individual whiteboard updated can be inconvenient. If a department has dozens or hundreds of devices in its fleet, individual manual update sessions can take weeks or months to complete. 

Modern public safety training solutions such as interactive whiteboards require modern management solutions as well. For instance, reliable, cloud-based device management software can perform low-level maintenance and security functions. It enables you to connect wirelessly and securely to each device when updating software. 

Reliable device management also secures interactive whiteboards from unauthorized users. Administrators can remotely log out users who are trying to copy private data or launch unproductive applications (such as social media or games). They can also shut down or freeze devices that have been reported as stolen, lost, or compromised. 

Enhance Public Safety Training With Modern Training Hardware

Considering that today’s crop of new public safety officers are digital natives who grew up on modern technology, it makes sense for government agencies and departments to modernize their training equipment. Interactive whiteboards are a better alternative to the previous training trio of static whiteboards, bulb projectors, and obsolete video players. 

For trainers, managing and conducting a training session becomes much easier. More importantly, they have a better chance to engage the audience and boost their participation.

For students, the prospect of active learning and instant feedback is more than enough reason to choose interactive whiteboard-based training. Such training is often more fun as well, which leads to positive learning experiences every time.

When you modernize public safety training with interactive whiteboards, be sure to include a companion device manager for your fleet investment. A reliable device platform to manage, maintain, and secure your devices will make the most of your investment and prolong your device lifespans considerably.

Nadav Avni, Chief Marketing Officer, Radix Technologies

Nadav has been at Radix Technologies for the past four years, originally joining as a marketing director. He has extensive experience in marketing from technology and advertising companies, having previously held roles at VBox Communications, Leverate and Nokia.